A Study Of Group Work Approach Applied To Task-based English Teaching In Secondary Vocational Schools

With the development of vocational education, the research on English teaching in vocational schools carries great significance. English teaching in vocational schools puts special stress on promoting students'practical English skills, improving their communicative competence and fostering students' basic proficiency in English reading, listening, writing, and speaking. To achieve these goals of vocational English teaching, more and more English teachers applied group work to English classroom in vocational schools.Group work is"a generic term covering a multiplicity of techniques in which two or more students are assigned a task that involves collaboration and self-initiated language"(Brown,1994). The theories on the importance of comprehensible input, comprehensible output and interaction in second language acquisition provide a well-founded rationale for studies on group work. It has been argued that group work provides students with rich opportunities to receive comprehensible input, to produce comprehensible output through interaction, which is considered essential to second language acquisitionIn review of the related researches, most researches on group work have been under the framework of cooperative learning. In fact, the characteristics of English teaching in vocational schools have pushed the rapid development of Task-based Language Teaching in secondary vocational schools. But few research on group work was conducted in Task-based Language Teaching settings in secondary vocational schools.The study attempts to testify the effectiveness of group work approach applied to Task-based Language Teaching in secondary vocational schools. The author has made an experimental research in No. 1 Professional Secondary School of Wei Fang, which lasted for one term. Altogether 74 students from two intact classes participated in the experiment. One class was set as the experiment group and the other as the control one. In the experiment class, 37 students were divided into 8 groups with 4-6 students each. A pretest and a posttest were administered respectively.The present study is to address the following questions:1) whether group work is effective in TBLT in secondary vocational schools;2) whether group work can change the student's attitude towards English learning;3) whether group work can produce special effects in the students' English learning;4) what problems still exist in group work in TBLT.Through the experiment, and based on analysis and discussion, the result of the study proved that group work, completely implemented through tasks in TBLT, has greatly encouraged students'participation in learning process and has a significant and positive effect on English teaching. All students turned positive attitudes to English learning, especially for the weak students. In this way, the students feel to be respected, cherished, encouraged and motivated in the learning process. From group work application, students mastered the collaborative social skills, built up self-confidence and self-esteem, learned in a more relaxed harmonious and autonomous learning atmosphere, and enjoyed new teacher-learner and learner-learner relationship. However, the problems of how to design a more scientific and suitable assessing system, how to make full use of the in-class time and the out-class time more properly still need further research.The study of group work approach applied to TBLT is of great significance theoretically and pedagogically. Theoretically, the study testified the effectiveness of group work in TBLT in secondary vocational schools. In addition, the results provided a positive evidence for foreign language acquisition. In practice, group work really expands a student's range of communicative experience, fosters skills of English, and thus develops high level of thinking and social interaction. The study provides both language teachers and learners another approach to the foreign language learning .